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Do you have a question about the Hugos that is not covered in our FAQ? If so, please ask it here and we will endeavor to answer it for you.

Please note, however, that we cannot issue definitive rulings about Hugo Award eligibility. Each year’s Worldcon establishes a Hugo Awards Administration Subcommittee the manages that year’s Hugo Awards. The Hugo Awards web site is not responsible for administering the Awards and therefore can’t give definitive answers about eligibility. If you have a question about whether a specific work is eligible and in which category, please contact the current year’s Worldcon and their Hugo Awards Administrators.

381 Responses to Ask a Question

The recent episode of Black Mirror, “Bandersnatch,” is an interactive piece. It runs 90 minutes on its default path, but also has multiple other scenes you can branch off to, albeit ones which would cause a gameplay with less time. Would Bandersnatch qualify for Long Form or Short Form?

The boundary between Short Form and Long Form has a 20% (18 minute) leeway precisely due to works that are not clearly one side or the other. Nominate this work in the category where you think it best fits. Short Form is generally intended for things in the nature of television episodes that are not clearly “two hour” or multi-part long works, while Long Form is generally intended for theatrical motion pictures. Anything else is left as a judgment call of the nominators.

Just one ordinary nominator’s opinion, but I would lean toward Long Form because there is more than 90 minutes worth of material even if you don’t watch the other variations. If a “Choose Your Own Adventure” type written story were ever nominated, I would think it would go in the category of its complete word count. I haven’t watch this yet, but I imagine part of the point is that many people would watch more than just the default path.

Also, to go along with what Kevin said about it *generally* breaking down into tv episode vs. movie (obviously some movies are shorter and some tv episodes longer), I notice that Netflix has it as a separate film listing instead of including it with the other Black Mirror episodes.

Hello, Kevin. The last collection of Hugo Winners was published in a solely paperback edition in 1997 – twenty years back! Is there some kind of tussle which is preventing print publication of a 5-yearly collection? Thanks.

There are no issues with using the Hugo Awards service marks, if that’s what you mean. To the best of our knowledge, the only real issue is that no publisher/editor has wanted to take on the somewhat substantial challenge of obtaining the rights to collect the works and the commercial challenge of publishing such a collection.

WSFS rules currently require that “the results of the last ten rounds of the finalist selection process for each category (or all the rounds if there are fewer than ten)” be published by the Administrators. Prior to the adoption of the current nomination system, the rule was that the top fifteen positions in each category be published. Committees have never been required to list works beyond that minimum, although they are not prohibited from doing so. Some have gone farther than the top fifteen, although to our knowledge, none have ever gone down to the “anyone at all who was nominated” level because the “long tail” of nominations is absurdly long.

The detailed nominations information is published after the Hugo Awards are announced at Worldcon, and to the extent that we have the information, you can find it on each individual year’s Hugo Awards page. For example, the detailed information for the 2018 Hugo Awards, Campbell Award, and Award for Best Young Adult Book is at https://www.worldcon76.org/images/publications/2018DetailedResults.pdf.

Some fans wanted to nominate my musical and soundtrack album The Mirror’s Revenge, and they didn’t know which category to use. The play is 122 minutes, but the album is 60 minutes. I believe they used the Dramatic Presentation Short Form. Can you tell me if those ballots were counted, or was the nomination deemed ineligible due to length? Is there some other category for theatrical presentations? I never see plays nominated, and there is lots of good science fiction put on stage. As a playwright, I’d like to increase exposure for stage work to the science fiction community.

The Hugo Awards are open to works published in any language, including French. Note that there is no submission process for the Hugo Awards. Works are nominated by the thousands of members of the World Science Fiction Convention. See the Submissions page for a longer explanation.

I am asking for assistance. Sometime back I read a book and the main character was a young woman. She wrecked two boats, there was a hole shot through the earth, a monolith was involved and a dead star. I can’t recall the name of the book or the author but I loved the ending. I would like to find the book again. Thanks, Greg J. Houska, Missoula, MT.

Who is the host of this year’s awards? I met her quickly in a shop recently and would love to check out her work, but I did not listen carefully enough when she actually introduced herself at the end of our conversation- she only mentioned that she was hosting this year’s awards!

We know that IRV was not being used in 1965, and we know that it was being used in 1971. So usage was implemented sometime between those two years. If the WSFS rules were published in the convention programme book at that time (as they are now), we may be able to find an old programme book which provides the year of the change.

Well, Dan, you got me curious, so with some help from people who pointed me at the right resources, I discovered that the WSFS Business Meeting members made instant-runoff voting (IRV) part of the Hugo Award process at NYcon III in 1967, and it was used for the first time on the 1968 Hugo Awards at Baycon. Thanks for spurring us to find that information!

Is the tale that the Apollo 11 astronauts received a special Hugo award in 1969 for the Best Moon Landing Ever true or apocryphal? I’ve heard it for years, but when I searched the website for 1969 I didn’t find it.